was idly reading an old essay by Dwight Macdonald on an awful-sounding novel by James Gould Cozzen this morning when I stumbled upon a smart passage on the nature of Americans.
“We Americans have always had a weakness for the law. Its objectivity reassures our skittish dread of emotion and its emphasis on The Facts suits our pragmatic temper,” Macdonald writes. “But above all the law is our substitute for philosophy, which makes us almost as nervous as emotion does. Its complicated, precise formulae have the external qualities of theoretical thinking, lacking only the most essential one—they don’t illuminate reality, since what is ‘given’ is not the conditions of life but merely a narrow convention.”
Emphasis mine, because it helps illuminate some of the annoyance I felt with the amateur constitutionalists who swarmed social media to whinge about the Death of the Republic because Joker Tsarnaev didn’t get Mirandized. Part of it was just social signaling, of course. The Very Serious People had to show just why they deserve the capital letters. They are, after all, Very Serious.
There was also, however, a legitimate ignorance about what, exactly, “Miranda Rights” entail. At first, I was content to blame Law and Order, like everyone else. Dick Wolf has transformed the Miranda Warning into the one thing about getting arrested everyone knows: you don’t have to talk to the cops without a lawyer present. However, the depth of passion that many of the ignorant exhibited gave me pause. For them, this wasn’t a picayune question of law. No no. This was a philosophical crisis, a violation of natural rights. We were risking our nation’s soul by failing to tell the attempted mass murderer (and successful fratricide) that he didn’t need to talk to the cops.
It is as Macdonald wrote: We Americans are far more comfortable with law than philosophy, but we want to consider ourself a philosophically inclined people. So we have substituted the law for philosophy, allowing us to pat ourselves on the back for being deep thinkers and Very Serious People while not actually having to grapple with the underpinnings of what we argue. It’s a neat trick, but only a trick. And one that speaks ill of our nation’s critical faculties.
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